When the military trains its fighting men and women, I’ve heard it is impressed on them they need to take care of the person to their left and their right. It’s a psychology thing. They fight for each other—take care of each other.

When they come home, it’s every man/woman for themselves. Is this the way it was meant to be?

We live in a very corporate culture, but I’ve seen how people resist the concept that we have lost sight of how to take care of each other. Our center is us, our families and near relatives. We depend on a broken system to take care of everyone else. It is a system that is failing us all.

We seek to promote our own ideals on everyone else, and we amass with like-minds to do so. Freedom is a fleeting thing. Freedom is relative to definition—our own.

When immigrants first came to America, there was no freedom. Puritans came here to practice Puritanism, and to hell with everyone else. My ancestors worked to convert indigenous peoples to Puritanism, and they killed off those they couldn’t convert. Growing up in a mainstay Congregationalist (Puritan) church, we, as children, were taught Catholics were the bad guys. Religion divides. I have many history books written back when America became America, and I can assure they look nothing like our history books of today. We’ve cleaned ourselves up—absolved ourselves of all our sins—and forgotten we are human beings who are certainly fallible. Our countrywide landscape was quite different with game and fish and other people.

I lived down the street from a river. In history books written so long ago, I was surprised to learn that river had been so filled with salmon, an ordinance had been passed stating apprentices could only be fed salmon three times a week. By the time I came along, the river reeked of discarded sulfur from the leather plants dumping their discarded tanning products upriver. Fish? What fish?

For a while, it seemed we were cleaning up our acts. Things reverted back, somewhat, to cleaner days. We created laws, but those laws outsourced our bad habits to other countries.

So what’s left? We are left. Fill in the gap.

We have many rising crises that, in the heat of our personal days, we are choosing to ignore. The vast majority of us choose to believe those in charge will keep us safe overall. We elected them, right?

So what gives? Seventy percent of Americans are now chronically ill—our lifespans are declining and we are thirty-fifth in the world in infant mortality rates. It is reverting back to the days of old when women knew it was safer to deliver babies at home than in a hospital.

And our food? We have geared up to mass production—mass profit. In the interest of such, we now have our genetically modified foods or GMOs, if you will. And why have we modified many of them? The answer is herbicides. It’s easier, cheaper, and more geared towards profit to modify plants so that the herbicides we use don’t kill our crops. There are other reasons, but this is the main one. The shikimic acid pathway is modified out of plants to allow the herbicide to kill only the weeds with them. Herbicides ingrain themselves into our food and are passed down in our cooking pots.

That would be fine if we were only made up of human cells. We are bags of water, human cells, and bacterial partners that serve to make us healthy. Gut bacteria is a big’un. The problem is those bacterial cells contain shikimic acid pathways. Every time we eat non-organic foods we are killing off our partners.

Rumor is that those in the know, know this. Herbicides are a billion-dollar business but what is a person’s life worth?

Below is some scary stuff, but it doesn’t have to be. It’s a glitch in time. It means we must take time out of our busy lives and look to our left and our right and fight the battle with the people next to us.

We have terrific minds amongst us urging us to change. They will help.

“Since the active site of the EPSPS enzyme is highly consistent in higher plants, glyphosate affects a broad spectrum of weeds indiscriminately. Inhibiting the function of the shikimic acid pathway causes a deficiency in aromatic amino acids, eventually leading to the plant’s death by starvation.”

“Abstract: Glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup, is the most popular herbicide used worldwide. The industry asserts it is minimally toxic to humans, but here we argue otherwise. Residues are found in the main foods of the Western diet, comprised primarily of sugar, corn, soy and wheat. Glyphosate’s inhibition of cytochrome P450 (CYP) enzymes is an overlooked component of its toxicity to mammals. CYP enzymes play crucial roles in biology, one of which is to detoxify xenobiotics. Thus, glyphosate enhances the damaging effects of other food-borne chemical residues and environmental toxins. Negative impact on the body is insidious and manifests slowly over time as inflammation damages cellular systems throughout the body. Here, we show how interference with CYP enzymes acts synergistically with disruption of the biosynthesis of aromatic amino acids by gut bacteria, as well as impairment in serum sulfate transport. Consequences are most of the diseases and conditions associated with a Western diet, which include gastrointestinal disorders, obesity, diabetes, heart disease, depression, autism, infertility, cancer and Alzheimer’s disease. We explain the documented effects of glyphosate and its ability to induce disease, and we show that glyphosate is the “textbook example” of exogenous semiotic entropy: the disruption of homeostasis by environmental toxins.”